McGovern, 1972 Democratic presidential nominee, dies At 90

New York Times :
October 21, 2012
: Updated: October 21, 2012 11:41pm

FILE - In this July 14, 1972 file photo, Sen. George S. McGovern makes his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention in Miami Beach. At left is his running mate, Sen. Thomas F. Eagleton of Missouri, and at right, convention chairman Lawrence F. O'Brien. A family spokesman says, McGovern, the Democrat who lost to President Richard Nixon in 1972 in a historic landslide, has died at the age of 90. According to the spokesman, McGovern died Sunday, Oct. 21, 2012 at a hospice in Sioux Falls, surrounded by family and friends. (AP Photo)

Photo By File photo/Associated Press

In this Jan. 20 photo, George McGovern speaks during First Coast Technical College’s winter commencement ceremony in St. Augustine, Fla. McGovern was a gentleman and patriotic public servant.

George McGovern, the U.S. senator who won the Democratic Party's presidential nomination in 1972 as an opponent of the war in Vietnam and a champion of liberal causes, and who then was trounced by President Richard M. Nixon in the general election, died early Sunday in Sioux Falls, S.D. He was 90.

His death was announced in a statement by the family. He had been moved to hospice care in recent days after being treated for several health problems in the past year. He had a home in Mitchell, S.D., where he had spent his formative years.

In a statement, President Barack Obama called McGovern “a champion for peace” who was a “statesman of great conscience and conviction.”

To the liberal Democratic faithful, McGovern remained a standard-bearer well into his old age, writing and lecturing even as his name was routinely invoked by conservatives as synonymous with what they considered the failures of liberal politics.

He never retreated from those ideals, however, insisting on a strong, “progressive” federal government to protect the vulnerable and expand economic opportunity while asserting that history would prove him correct in his opposing not only what he called “the tragically mistaken American war in Vietnam” but also the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.

A slender, soft-spoken minister's son newly elected to Congress — his father was a Republican — McGovern went to Washington as a 34-year-old former college history teacher and decorated bomber pilot in World War II. He thought of himself as a son of the prairie as well, with a fittingly flat, somewhat nasal voice and a brand of politics traceable to the Midwestern progressivism of the late 19th century.

Elected to the Senate in 1962, McGovern left no special mark in his three terms, but he voted consistently in favor of civil rights and antipoverty bills, was instrumental in developing and expanding food stamp and nutrition programs, and helped lead opposition to the Vietnam War in the Senate.

That was the cause he took into the 1972 election, one of the most lopsided in U.S. history. McGovern carried only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia and won just 17 electoral votes to Nixon's 520.

The campaign was the backdrop to the burglary at the Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate Hotel in Washington, and by the Nixon organization's shady fundraising practices and sabotage operations, later known as “dirty tricks,” which were not disclosed until after the election.

Bad image

The Republicans portrayed McGovern as a left-winger, a threat to the military and the free-market economy, and outside the mainstream of American thought. Fair or not, he never lived down the image of a liberal loser, and many Democrats long accused him of leading the party astray.

McGovern resented that characterization mightily.

“I always thought of myself as a good old South Dakota boy who grew up here on the prairie,” he said in an interview in 2005 in his home in Mitchell. “My dad was a Methodist minister. I went off to war. I have been married to the same woman forever. I'm what a normal, healthy, ideal American should be like.

“But we probably didn't work enough on cultivating that image,” he added, referring to his campaign organization. “We were more interested in ending the war in Vietnam and getting people out of poverty and being fair to women and minorities and saving the environment.

“It was an issue-oriented campaign, and we should have paid more attention to image.”

McGovern was 49 and in his second Senate term when he won the 1972 Democratic nomination, outdistancing a dozen or so other aspirants, including Sen. Edmund S. Muskie of Maine, the early front-runner; former Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, the nominee in 1968; and Gov. George C. Wallace of Alabama, a populist with a segregationist past who was gravely wounded in an assassination attempt in Maryland during the primaries.

McGovern benefited from new party rules that he had been largely responsible for writing, and from a corps of devoted young volunteers, including Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham, who took time off from Yale Law School to work on the campaign in Texas.

The nominating convention in Miami was a disastrous start to the general election campaign. There were divisive platform battles over Vietnam, abortion, welfare and court-ordered busing to end racial discrimination. The eventual platform was probably the most liberal ever adopted by a major party in the United States. It advocated immediate withdrawal from Vietnam, amnesty for war resisters, abolition of the draft, a guaranteed job for all Americans and a guaranteed family income well above the poverty line.

Several prominent Democrats declined McGovern's offer to be his running mate before he finally chose Sen. Thomas F. Eagleton of Missouri.

McGovern's organization was so disorganized that by the time he went to the convention rostrum for his acceptance speech, it was nearly 3 a.m. He delivered perhaps the best speech of his life.

“We reject the view of those who say, ‘America, love it or leave it,'” he declared. “We reply, ‘Let us change it so we can love it more.'”

The delegates loved it, but most television viewers had long since gone to bed.

The convention was barely over when word got out that Eagleton had been hospitalized three times in the 1960s for what was called nervous exhaustion, and that he had undergone electroshock therapy.

McGovern declared that he was behind his running mate “a thousand percent.” But less than two weeks after the nomination, Eagleton was dropped from the ticket and replaced by R. Sargent Shriver, the Kennedy in-law and former director of the Peace Corps.

The campaign never recovered from the Eagleton debacle. Republicans taunted McGovern for backing everything a thousand percent. Commentators said his treatment of Eagleton had shown a lack of spine.

Falling behind﻿﻿

With a well-oiled campaign operation and a big financial advantage, Nixon began far ahead and kept increasing his lead. When McGovern proposed deep cuts in military programs and a $1,000 grant to every American, Nixon jeered, calling the ideas liberalism run amok. Nixon, meanwhile, cited accomplishments like the Paris peace talks on Vietnam, an arms limitation treaty with the Soviet Union, a prosperous economy and a diplomatic opening to China.

On election night, McGovern did not bother to call Nixon. He simply sent a telegram offering congratulations. Then, he said, he sat on his bed at the Holiday Inn in Sioux Falls and wrote his concession speech on hotel stationery.

In 1984, McGovern made another run for the presidency, but withdrew after winning only 23 convention delegates, most of them in Massachusetts.

George Stanley McGovern was born on July 19, 1922, in a parsonage in Avon, S.D., a town of about 600 people where his father, Joseph, was the pastor of the Wesleyan Methodist Church. His mother, the former Frances McLean, was a homemaker about 20 years her husband's junior.

The family moved to Mitchell, in southeastern South Dakota, when George was 6. He went to high school and college there, enrolling at Dakota Wesleyan University in Mitchell in 1940. After Pearl Harbor, McGovern joined the Army Air Corps, and before going overseas, in 1943, he married Eleanor Stageberg, whom he'd met at Dakota Wesleyan.

McGovern was trained to fly the B-24 Liberator, a four-engine heavy bomber, and he flew dozens of missions over Germany, Austria and Italy.

On his 30th mission, his plane was struck by enemy fire and his navigator was killed. McGovern crash-landed the plane on an island in the Adriatic. He earned a Distinguished Flying Cross for the exploit.

After his discharge, McGovern returned to Mitchell — his father had recently died — and resumed his studies at Dakota Wesleyan. He graduated in 1946 and went to Northwestern University for graduate studies in history.

With a master's degree, he returned to Dakota Wesleyan, a small university, to teach history and political science.

McGovern eventually left teaching to become executive secretary of the South Dakota Democratic Party, and almost single-handedly revived a moribund party in a heavily Republican state.